There is no evidence of any intentional exclusion or supression of kings, as contemporary and ephemeral kings are included, even the foreign kings of the Second Intermediate Period. Unlike the other king lists of the New Kingdom, it was not produced for religious purposes, but instead as an administrative chronological reference aid, containing the names and reign lengths of the kings of the Two Lands. The papyrus was lost for some 3000 years, perhaps buried in a forgotten tomb or temple near Thebes in Upper Egypt. The bicentenary of the discovery of the king list is in The facsimiles offer us a glimpse of a better preserved king list, as several signs seen in the facsimiles, has been irretrievably lost. This is perhaps not as bad as it sounds, since the papyrus has deteriorated due to mounting and re-mounting during the intervening 175 years. Instead we have to rely on traced facsimiles from the 1840’s and 1850’s, which naturally contain a few minor errors. Many of the preserved names does not appear inscribed on the Abydos, Saqqara, and Karnak king lists from the New Kingdom.ĭespite its importance, there has been no scientific study, and high quality photographs of the papyrus were not published until September of 2019. Of these, 126 are complete or partial, and the remaining 97 entirely lost in the lacuna. The intact papyrus would have contained the names of 223 kings. The king list is written on the back side of a Nineteenth Dynasty discarded administative papyrus from the reign of Ramesses II. The papyrus is in very poor shape, less than a third of it remains, having crumbled into hundreds of tiny fragments by handling and during the transport to Italy, after its discovery around 1820. It is often referred to as the Turin king list, or the Royal Canon of Turin, which originate with Champollion’s 1824 description as “un véritable tableau chronologique, un canon royal”, a true chronological timeline, a royal canon. A hieratic papyrus at the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy, is without a doubt the most important king list of Ancient Egypt.
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